Better in their words…

Media beats the CDC drama drum, Kennedy boomerangs it; USAID meets Vought’s axe; Kari Lake brawls globalists; Texas okays OTC ivermectin; and guess what’s back for variant season.

Source: TICKING ☙ Sunday, August 31, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Corporate media continued to focus on the CDC director’s firing yesterday, rounding out a full week of top-of-page news coverage. The Washington Post ran its story this morning headlined, “As RFK Jr. upends America’s public health system, Trump cheers him on.” Seriously, WaPo, what kind of ‘news’ is “Trump cheers?”

CLIP: Trump Team fights back; FDA Commish Makary mocks CDC as unable to even setup a website with 22,000 employees (0:52).

The Washington Post devoted 11 minutes of your morning to informing readers that Donald Trump kept a promise. Last year, he vowed to unleash Kennedy at HHS and let him “go wild.” Then Trump unleashed Kennedy at HHS. Cue the pearly tooth-gnashing: three CDC chiefs flounced out, Senator Murkowski fired off a sternly worded letter, and experts warned darkly about a national health crisis.

Corporate media thought it had a week-long winner: wall-to-wall coverage of Kennedy’s “alarming” CDC shake-up. They threw the whole newsroom at it —grieving bureaucrats, fretful senators, anonymous experts— but paradoxically, instead of tearing Kennedy a new one, the ceaseless coverage has only boosted him instead.

It backfired! According to WaPo, Gallup found Kennedy polling higher than Trump, Vance, and basically anyone else in the administration. It’s not clear who corporate media thinks they are frightening. “Only one-third of MAGA supporters say they trust the CDC’s vaccine recommendations,” WaPo admitted.

One-third still trust the CDC? Who are these people, and what giant rock are they living under? Or maybe that’s folks who trust it now that Kennedy is in charge.

Anyway, WaPo reported that, “Democrats and public health experts say they are determined to amp up their pressure on Kennedy.” But, “RFK is on more sure footing than many in D.C. appreciate,” said health care policy analyst Chris Meekins.

Amping up pressure is amping up Kennedy’s popularity.

I’m beating a long-dead horse (probably an ivermectin overdose), but the CDC bonfired whatever political capital it had during the pandemic, becoming the hated face of irrational mandates like made-up six-foot distancing and cloth masks duct-taped to toddlers. Now, corporate media’s savage efforts to ruin Kennedy (and through him, Trump) with this CDC reorganization are ironically having the exact opposite effect.

💉 Proving the disconnect, wild-haired socialist Senator Bernie Sanders penned a New York Times op-ed yesterday calling for Kennedy’s resignation, over what looks to most people like a long-overdue personnel shuffle:

But headlines like Bernie’s just convince Republicans that whatever Kennedy is doing must be working.

Conservatives have been starving for accountability, ever since “fifteen days to slow the spread” turned into fifteen months of arbitrary edicts. Now they’re finally seeing heads roll and agencies get flipped upside down. Every “Kennedy fired someone” or “Kennedy questioned the sacred narrative” story isn’t damaging; it’s dopamine.

MAHA sees it as overdue justice. And the more the media screams “dangerous!” the more the base hears, “progress.”

Believe it or not, Kennedy’s CDC re-vamp is shaping up to be another 80/20 issue. Normal Americans don’t know who ‘Susan Monarez’ is, and they don’t care. But they do remember being ordered to strap cloth masks on preschoolers, losing jobs over mandates, and being gaslit over side effects. And they know that all the while, kids are getting sicker, more autistic, and more puffed up.

I suspect the media freakout began after the Cabinet meeting. WaPo and NYT suddenly ran a full week of “Kennedy is destabilizing public health” stories right after Kennedy teased that an autism announcement would drop next month. If Kennedy really has data or an investigation queued up, it risks blowing open the biggest credibility crisis the CDC/FDA could face.

So they are trying to take him down however they can, and Susan Monarez’s termination is all they’ve got.

But it’s not working. It’s backfiring.

Oh, how I hope they keep covering Kennedy for another week. I double-dog dare them.

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A pair of terrific follow-up headlines brightened yesterday’s news cycle. The first one appeared in the Hill, below the headline, “Vought to oversee ‘closeout’ of USAID, Rubio says.” Seven months in, and the worst, most damaging agency in U.S. history is finally shutting down for good.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought is the Administration’s closest thing to an axe-man; he’s a bureaucratic grim reaper. Yesterday, former Florida Senator and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio handed Vought the scythe and told him to shutter USAID for good. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Rubio said.

In what was probably no accident, the “independent” foreign-aid agency USAID became DOGE’s first and biggest target. In a series of stunning disclosures, the nation learned that USAID was a massive globalist slush fund, showering progressive NGOs with golden grants used to prop up Democrats and undermine conservative values and right-leaning governments all around the world.

But USAID didn’t go down easily. Closing that fortress of liberalism required navigating seven months of Democrat hysteria and lawfare to finally reach this point, where Secretary Rubio can now pull USAID’s plug for good. It’s a remarkable achievement that shouldn’t be underestimated. Before Trump, USAID was considered untouchable, having been created and funded by Congress and declared “independent” under federal law.

Now, mercifully, it’s almost over.

🔥 In the same vein of corrupt, communist agencies that need to be finally closed, our second follow-up headline popped up yesterday in Politico below the headline, “Kari Lake lays off hundreds at VOA parent agency amid legal battle.” The sub-headline whined, “Kari Lake was tasked by President Donald Trump to oversee the dismantling of global news broadcast network Voice of America.” Good.

Yesterday, Kari announced 500 more layoffs, which the BBC referred to as “most of Voice of America’s staff,” all of which squat under the umbrella of the “US Agency for Global Media.” USAGM runs VOA and is a flat-out propaganda arm of the US government. It’s also another of the so-called untouchable “independent agencies.” Lake’s bureaucratic deconstruction project remains in its lawfare phase, and Politico gleefully reported the most recent minor legal setbacks, as the cases move through the woke court system.

Politico framed the layoffs as a “cost reduction” effort, which is fair enough, but neglected to mention that Voice of America and USAGM were long ago co-opted by progressives and, like USAID, are used to help overthrow right-leaning foreign governments wherever in the world progressives find them.

One can only imagine how relieved other countries were, when Kari Lake first arrived and shut down the broadcast.

As early as 1947, Republicans complained the propaganda network was not the Voice of America, so much as the “voice of radical left-wingers.” In the 1950s, heroic anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy spent six precious weeks trying to uncover the rot at VOA’s core. In the 1980s, Reagan tried to prune the agency and failed.

But this year, right after being appointed, Lake immediately canceled a $250 million luxury renovation of USAGM’s headquarters building. Since then, Kari has gotten further and farther along than conservatives ever did in eighty years of trying.

This round of layoffs might seem like a minor development in the bigger picture, but a simple Google News search of the last two days reveals dozens, if not hundreds, of overwrought corporate media stories complaining about the latest staff reduction. Like their over-reaction to Trump’s firing Susan Monarez —his own nominee— the reaction to USAID’s downsizing tells us everything we need to know.

More, please!

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In last week’s special legislative session, Texas tackled one of the wormiest issues going, and Lone Star progressives cried themselves to sleep last night. The Dallas Morning News ran the story headlined, “Over-the-counter ivermectin headed to Texas pharmacies as bill goes to Gov. Greg Abbott.

Think about it: they want over-the-counter experimental mRNA jabs, but not Nobel prize-winning, over-the-counter ivermectin. You try explaining it.

On Wednesday, Secretary Kennedy met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott over the state’s progress in advancing medical freedom. Abbot had added the ivermectin issue to his recent special legislative session (called to handle redistricting), and late last week, the Texas House sent up the pill bill to Abbot for signature.

It wasn’t easy. You’d think, at this point, and after half the country gobbling the pills and paste like it was going out of style, ivermectin would be less controversial. But no. The bill was opposed by the Texas Medical Association and endured hours of profanity-laced, high-stakes, “raucous” floor debate. For instance, one representative called ivermectin supporters “jackasses,” and at another point, the bill’s sponsor shut down debate saying, “Not today, Satan.”

Tennessee became the first state to make the drug easily available in 2022. Since then, Arkansas, Idaho, and Louisiana have joined the anti-parasitic party— and now, Texas.

The significance of this shift —even if only in five states so far— cannot be overstated. These five states, now including one of the nation’s biggest, are rejecting the FDA and charting their own medical course. This could onlyhave happened after the profound loss of trust in the institutions fueled by the pandemic.

If the FDA’s real pandemic mission had really been about protecting health, then it should have let physicians and patients experiment with ivermectin during Covid, instead of waging war against it. By hammering ivermectin instead of permitting exploration, the FDA triggered the very outcome it claimed to be attempting to avoid: public distrust.

People noticed the double standard — “try an experimental vaccine, but don’t touch this Nobel-winning antiparasitic.” The FDA could have said: “We don’t yet have conclusive evidence. Physicians may prescribe it off-label, and we’ll monitor outcomes closely.”

That would have balanced caution with respect for medical freedom. Instead, the scorched-earth response turned ivermectin into a cultural symbol of medical freedom, minted a whole new, stubborn independent streak, and broke the CDC/FDA’s iron grip on American health.

Thanks, FDA!

The agency’s “horse paste crackdown” triggered a mass awakening. Instead of protecting their credibility, the agencies torched it. And in its place, they accidentally built a grassroots medical independence movement that won’t go back in the barn.

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We’re headed into fall covid season, so get ready! Here come the scariants! Friday, ABC ran this scary/not-scary headline: “COVID cases, hospitalizations ticking up in the US but remain lower than last year.” Okay, but how much lower than last year? I am not making this sub-headline up: “Hospitalizations are three times lower compared to the same time last year.”

Not only that, but ABC reported that even positive covid tests “are about two times lower compared to the same period last year.”

So … Beware! They’re ticking up! Lockdown-loving Dr. William Schaffner (fake name alert), a Vanderbilt University professor of preventive medicine, told ABC that Americans should plan to “do some social distancing” and “stream the movie rather than going to the movie.” Stay home! Germaphobic Dr. Peter Chin-Hong (same), an ‘infectious disease expert’ at the University of California, warned “Fewer people are getting hospitalized, proportionately speaking, but some people are still being hospitalized.”

Like the unfortunate stars of the show Hoarders, they just can’t let go of that stack of old 2020’s newspapers. Instead of framing it as “Covid is fizzling into background noise,” they dredged up the tired old tropes: new variants (XFG, NB.1.8.1, LP.8.1 — now it sounds like a printer cartridge aisle), AAP demanding jabs for infants, CVS adjusting rollout rules, and advising parents to ignore the CDC’s latest guidance.

I mean, you just can’t make this stuff up. I really thought my work of debunking covid fear porn was complete. But here it comes again. A blogging lawyer’s work is never done.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you, once again, for your continued support. I’ll return tomorrow, with some sort of Labor Day roundup. No promises though. Either way, we’ll kick the week off right. See you then.

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